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All the great dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into clever, creative and frequently touching plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and emotion seamlessly merge in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he regularly explored in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on money, wedlock, values, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly declared crazy and confined in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a